“Good morning 🙂 “
Before the traces of sleep left the eyes, still curled up inside the blanket on a cold morning, a tweet was posted, the notification bar that lighted red across the blue bar of facebook was religiously checked upon, emails checked and various other notifications were duly unread from whatever the Smartphone displayed. The snoozed alarm rang itself for another time, vibrating right into my hands, and hence the day began.
The day of a social media addict.
Well, it is not a biographical account of a random guy, but a simplified and collaged explanation of how the day of a socially active species would look like. A day where each of the happenings on a daily basis, or preferably hourly, or even more frequently than that, knocks itself up on any of these platforms. The indulgence gets multiplied, and the social life over the internet appears to be more active than the actual “social life.” Without bothering ourselves about the pros and cons on which life is better, or which one isn’t or to engage ourselves in another useless discussion like the one frequently happening on social media, let’s just concentrate on the story that unfolds for this guy, which we are so indulgently talking about.
The daily drama unfolds with the morning, bringing upon the overnight carry-forward social baggage with it. The Facebook messages, the likes on the recently uploaded pictures, counting the number of RTs the tweets have got, the endorsements on LinkedIn, and the list goes on. All of this carries along throughout the morning chores, the breakfast, newspaper; everything goes hand in hand along with the Tweeting and FBing garnishing the breakfast platter. Multi-tasking couldn’t have defined itself in a better way.
While pictures, with their editing of the breakfast food, tagged as “yummy”, “out of the world” or simply delicious” find their way to internet through Instagram, tweets describing, “the awesome start to the day, with the amazing Cheese Sandwiches” grace the Twitter Timeline, while perhaps a “Thank you Mom for the amazing Breakfast”, by tagging her there would update itself on Facebook. Thank you on the breakfast table is, so mainstream you know.
College starts with a Check-in on Foursquare update of “Your Highness” entering the premises and at the same post being shared on Facebook and Twitter. Notifications and Mentions pour in from the college brethren, as to the whereabouts of the hangout or why some of them won’t be coming.
The long walk to the spot, the head hung down, not in shame but latched with an ultimate concentration on the hands holding the powerful device. The walk itself is no mean feat, where dodging the passer-by and continuing to reply on the messages are a big achievement in itself. At least when the perfection is such, that an injury-free me reaches to buzz in a high-five with the buddies.
The hangout, of course, involves lots of chit-chats, banter, and discussions ranging from anything to everything. All along, something which matches the tag of being “funny,” “interesting,” and “weird” gets tweeted or posted to Facebook. The general rule is, everything which can be limited to 140 characters may find its way to Twitter, while stuff which is on the higher side of the humor/interesting quotient scale, gets updated on the facebook wall.
Classrooms of course, cannot be livelier than our “class contributions” in the form of WATSAPPing.
And just when things would somehow get finalized, an update on Facebook disclosing our whereabouts and plans for the evening, with the necessary tags would surface. (Open invite for stalkers if anyone wanted to). The update would also ring up comments, along with their sad looking smilies.
Interestingly, more than anything in the long-drive or sometimes a bowling session or just some food indulgence, it would be making sure that an adequate number of pictures giving evidence that we were there. Reminds of the time when people used to carve out their initials on Rocks or trees only to revisit those years later. This is the digitalized version of the same.
The only glitch comes, when with the amount of usage, the batteries in most of the phones, dies down slowly. With nothing much to update or tweet, we have to Talk to each other!! To our surprise, the talk builds upon the fun and the time way back home passes in a flash.
But, once all of them reach their home, the first thing that they all do, after getting a little scolding from either of the parents for being late, is to look for the Lifesaver- The Charger.
And then, the virtual life of the social media addicts are back with their tweets, updates, and uploads on the Internet.